교육공정성, 능력주의가 보장할 수 있는가?: ‘능력’ 형성의 맥락에 대한 이론적 검토

Abstract

Meritocracy has been viewed as a stepping stone for social transformation and innovation, which can overcome premodern, hereditary, and unfair social systems based on the belief that anyone can be rewarded for hard work and talent. Today, however, meritocracy is criticized for undermining democratic citizenship in a political sense, strengthening inequality and polarization in an economic sense, fostering discrimination and exclusion in a socio-cultural sense, and serving as a mechanism for justifying unfairness in society. Specifically, education is considered a key driver of this meritocracy, and it is thus pushed into serving only as a means to promote one’s social status and class through competition. Nevertheless, meritocracy is still considered the basis for justifying educational equity. A legitimate basis for educational fairness is vital since it addresses issues that affect people's lives in terms of educational opportunities, educational processes, and equity in the distribution of educational outcomes. This study examines whether meritocracy can guarantee educational fairness by conducting a theoretical review. This study contends that meritocracy is a policy in which opportunity and effort input is an essential condition for merit formation, and therefore, its legitimacy is being questioned in terms of distribution. It is revealed that owing to the decontextualization, uniformization, and depersonalization inherent in the process, educational dystopia is inevitable. Furthermore, our argument confirms that in the era of meritocracy, education needs to address the meaning of merit that has become latent in terms of context, plurality, and personality, rather than merit for itself.